Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @02:11AM
from the no-hope-for-call-of-duty-kangaroo-wars dept.

eldavojohn writes "Kotaku is running an investigative piece examining what internet censorship means for games in Australia. Australia has some of the most draconian video game attitudes in the world, and the phrase 'refused classification' should strike fear in game developers and publishers looking to market games there. Internet censorship may expand this phrase to mean that anybody hosting anything about the game may suffer censorship in AU. Kotaku notes, 'This means that if a game is refused classification (RC) in Australia — like, say, NFL Blitz, or Getting Up — content related to these games would be added to the ISP filter. [This would bring up] a range of questions, foremost of those being: what happens when an otherwise harmless website ... hosts material from those games (screenshots, trailers, etc) that is totally fine in the US or Japan or Europe, but that has been refused classification in Australia?' Kotaku received a comment from the Australian Department of Broadband Communication promising that the whole website won't be blocked, just the material related to the game (videos, images, etc). Imagine maintaining that blacklist!"

Once the flood gates of ISP level censorship are pushed open, it's simply going to keep cascading until our Mate's internet connection is "sanitized" to death, where sanitized is on a sliding scale depending on whoever is in power at the time.

Once the ISPs are having trouble maintaining their REAL services for their users just because some non-sense law bullies them into this filtering, they will take action to change the law.

One of the main differences between rich countries and poor countries is how the law is regarded by the population.

In developed countries there is a general sentiment among the people that obeying the law is something that benefits everybody. In the Third World the general sentiment is that the law is something created by those in power for their own benefit.

The way things are going, expect a major increase in corruption and violence in the currently rich contries in the next decades. You cannot keep creating law after law that go against the wishes of the majority of the people without unwanted consequences.

In developed countries there is a general sentiment among the people that obeying the law is something that benefits everybody. In the Third World the general sentiment is that the law is something created by those in power for their own benefit.

So people from poorer, less developed countries generally have more common sense? A nudge toward lawlessness would certainly solve a large handful of problems.

You cannot keep creating law after law that go against the wishes of the majority of the people without unwanted consequences.

Truth be told, these laws aren't as unpopular IRL as we here on/. might like. Opposition runs deep but not particularly wide, especially when talking about violent video games and pornographic material (as distinguished from the short-lived attempt to censor anonymous political speech).

I think we all (myself included) have an unfortunate tendency to imagine that the majority of people agree with our most deeply held positions because we want to believe it. Regretfully, it ain't always so. The sooner we ac

In developed countries there is a general sentiment among the people that obeying the law is something that benefits everybody.

Really? While I've noticed that mentality to be true for those I know living in very controlled socialist countries (UK, AU, Germany), here in the US I find the general sentiment to be that laws are created by those in power for their own benefit. It's a minority of the US population that thinks that passing more laws is actually a GOOD thing.

The ISP industry of Australia have already taken action to block the law. There's been technical deconstruction of it. There's been alternatives proposed that could be more effective at protecting children from online materials. There's even one member of Stephen Conroy's own political party advocating at least changing the legislation to an optional filter.

When asked, "do you think the gubbimunts should make the intartubs safe for kiddiewinks?" most of the Australian population agree. When asked more

Hate replying to myself, particularly when I wanted to just make it funny, but FUCK this is going to be a growth industry in Australia.

Lets just work on youtube, 20 hours of vid uploaded per min (quick google search gave me this number), thats 1200 people required to be constantly watching new youtube vids for potentially bad content.

People can't work 24/7:)

So, in 8hr shifts, we have 3600 people... wait, holidays...

Lets just make it a round 4000 people employed just for keeping up with the current youtube

Under the current system, which I believe is intended to continue, they don't actually search the internet for RC'd material. Instead they only act on pages to which someone has submitted a complaint about. Only then do they go and check to see if it would be RC'd. If yes, they add to the secret black list.

There are 40 work hours a week (and a total of 168 hours), and the free time is about 3 weeks a year. Add one week for other issues (medical leave,...) and you end up working about 48 weeks a year, or some 1920 hours a year.
20 hours of content a minute, 525000 minutes a year makes 10 million hours of content a year, against 2000 hours work a year makes 5,000 employees.
Now, what about all the pictures updated to all the picture sites?

No problems, mate, you could outsource to China, they've got a nice headstart on that blacklist there. Oh, you'd need to skip the parts about Tibet and Taiwan and Tiamin Square and Democracy (not sure about this last one) but the porn & games section would probably suit you fine!

The upshot of this whole thing is of course that our jobless rate is going to evaporate as we are going to need that chunk of the the population to surf the net and flag possible bad content.

...

So, in 8hr shifts, we have 3600 people... wait, holidays...

More likely Australia is going to be funding the outsourcing industries in India and China. Wishful thinking on your part, but not very realistic. There are no silver linings here.

And yeah, I heard prices for Internet service is already sky-high in Australia; expect pricing to get worse while you need to pay for even more exorbitant services which deny you services. It's as sensible as politics gets.

Well, as someone else pointed out, this will mainly work on a submission system, so they are essentially crowd-sourcing it.

Now, as we all know, such systems can be easily dealt with either by DDoS (as pointed out, a firefox plugin that will submit every page you view to their department) or you could start strategically poisoning it, find parts of some of the catholic church pages that are infringing, and seeing if you can get them to ban whole domains:)

It's really the public sector way, I worked in public sector in the UK for a while, in local government, but I've seen it reaching to the top of British government, and even seen the same pattern from top to bottom in foreign governments.

It never ceases to amaze me how public sector beauracrats consistently manage to come up with schemes that achieve completely the opposite effect to what was intend, but that are also so obviously flawed that even the average layman in the street can tell you why said schem

I encourage every member of Slashdot to donate to Gamers 4 Croydon. Gamers for Croydon is a political party running against atkinson in his home seat in an attempt to raise awareness about the R18+ restriction on games and to oppose mandatory internet filtering. Seriously, go donate and spread the word

Why pick names which have connotations of either juvenile behaviour or stealing from copyright musicians and Hollywood?

I know they're not, but Joe Sixpack doesn't, will glaze over at the first mention of "P2P" "Bittorrent" or "deep packet inspection" and come away with the idea that some bum kids want to watch free porn at the expense of his paycheque.

FFS, get a clue about politics. Image means a hell of a lot, and "Gamers 4..." or "... Pirate Party" are not na

I'm recently doing a survey which will include game classification, there's no R and X classification for games. And not just internet filtering, but copyright, patent, whether they support other means to restrict content ownership and more. You can view a sample of the survey that was sent to parties here: http://shockseat.com/survey [shockseat.com] Although it's pretty amaterurish, it's already making it much easier to add more issues to my website.

Bonus: If my site takes off, I will get or at least present vague notions of what the parties plan to do so it would be up to the 'crowd' to demand clarity.

Instinctively, I want to do just that to try to stop such idiotic laws. However, it's their own damn fault for allowing their government to have such control that they're reaching this point. Seeing as how we constantly have articles about people all over the world in developed countries losing their rights to oppressive governments, I say let it happen and maybe the masses of asses will finally start to realize just why it's a bad thing to have government running every aspect of your life. Any time peop

You do know that self-immolation refers to suicide by fire, more specifically to a form of extreme protest by Buddhist monks. Monks who have taken vows not to harm other creatures set themselves on fire, it was commonplace in south Vietnam as protest against the war and corrupt South Vietnamese government and is occasionally done in China in protest over China's occupation of Tibet.

You do know that self-immolation refers to suicide by fire, more specifically to a form of extreme protest by Buddhist monks. Monks who have taken vows not to harm other creatures set themselves on fire, it was commonplace in south Vietnam as protest against the war and corrupt South Vietnamese government and is occasionally done in China in protest over China's occupation of Tibet.
Deffo used the wrong word there mate.

I don't know. If you give him a bit of poetic license, the idea of them dying in a self-induced fire due to intentions not to hurt others isn't too far out there.

Why can't we simply accept that this is the 21st century, and nothing should be censored? Ever.
Don't want to see the content within a particular video game? Great, don't look at it. That's your right. It is also mine to masturbate to bloody, mutilated appendages if I so choose.
Please replace "video game" above with any applicable form of media.

Why can't we simply accept that this is the 21st century, and nothing should be censored? Ever.

Politicians never got that upgrade. The bug in their code that compels them to control various aspects of peoples' lives for whatever reason has not been patched nor is there any real sign that it ever will be.

The problem with your idea is that there are a LOT of people out there (many of whom believe in some kind of non-existent god) who think its their god-given right to dictate what other people can and cannot do.

You say i in jest, but this report alone might be already enough. We're talking about RC games here. Is mentioning a "banned" game enough to get hit by the censor bat? Is reporting about a "censored" event, practice or even fad enough to be censored?

If so, it basically means that censoring ANY medium is perfectly possible in Australia now. Fox reported badly about the Aussie Prez? Let's see, did they have something about happy slapping lately? Yes? Great, *POOF*. BBC disagreeing with Australian foreign poli

Australia's parliament voted against internet censorship in 2008 and there was a lot less organisation against it then. This close to an election many pollies are thinking of their chances of being re-elected. The Greens still hold the balance of power in parliament and they are dead against the censorship scheme, most of the independents are offside now as well, the Opposition will vote no simply because Labor is voting yes.

I'll go one further than $50, I will bet my left testicle it never happens.

"the Opposition will vote no simply because Labor is voting yes"

Yep and when the Liberals were last in power Labor voted no to madatory filtering.

"most of the independents are offside now as well"

That was the whole point, Mr 2% lost interest pretty fast when his own anti-abortion sponsers *somehow* made it onto the proposed list. This shit has been going on for at least a decade, the two major parties take turns at being g

Bugger, screwed up the html for the link on the previous post. Here's a better post anyway, with the links fixed.

The trials have already been completed. Legislation is coming in the next few months. [smh.com.au] It's not just Conroy in favour of the filter, but a majority of cabinet. The Liberal party are in favour of censorship of the web in principle, however they disagree with some of the technical points of Conroy's proposal.

Conroy has said repeatedly he supports a mandatory filter. He is cabinet's salesman for it,

It's not quite a done deal, but has a smooth ride through Parliament. Party discipline in Australia is absolute, and any Labor member who votes against party lines (except during a declared "conscience vote") will be deselected automatically. Kevin Rudd, a self-defined social conservative, supports it. Meanwhile, the Coalition are headed by Tony Abbott, a hardline religious authoritarian culture-warrior often nicknamed the "Mad Monk"; for it to not get through, he would have to not only oppose it but exerci

I was inclined to agree until Tony Abbott rolled Malcolm Turnbull. There's no way Abbott would be saying no to an internet filter given his love for all things Catholic and his inability to separate that with his day-to-day job. Kate Lundy is the person to back now - campaigning for making it opt out (not ideal but more sane than no option) from within the Labor Party.

There's no way Abbott would be saying no to an internet filter given his love for all things Catholic

His hate for all things Labor is stronger then his love for all things Catholic. I doubt this will pass due to that fact alone. Labor will vote yes, Coalition will vote no, Greens and independents will decide it.

Abbott is a polly, his desire for any kind of power is stronger then any religious commitment, for Abbott this means opposing Labor at any opportunity. If he reverses the oppositions position hi

"Stopping child pornography is extremely important to me and the Liberal party and therefore, if we can prove the censorship plan doesn't work, we will oppose it; but only it. We will continue to seek effective means to block 'filth' (his word) from entering our country any way we can. If the filter works, we will support it."

Basically the message I got from his reply is that Tony Abbot believes that the filter will work "well enough" and is too much of a hot potato to oppose politically.

My prediction, this fails to pass again (seeing as the parliamentary seat distribution hasn't changed I cant see why not). Rudd wins next election (Abbott hasn't got a chance), moves Conroy into the position of Minster for Sorting Odd Socks and puts someone less offensive in the communications spot (possibly Lundy). In

But the question remains do they need to pass a bill through the Parliament, or can Conroy do it with the powers already invested in him? I think the first option is more likely but I haven't been confidently assured as such yet.

Yes, it needs to be put through parliament because its a federal law that cannot be overturned by state parliaments. The ratings system decided by the state Attorney Generals (which I assume you are referring to by "powers already invested") can be overturned by state (or federal)

This is especially worrying when you realise how corrupt the government in Australia is, I recently came to realised this when I found out that the Department of Education in NSW block access to ALL search engines accept google for students at public primary and high schools. (apart from yahoo which you can get one page of results from if you go to search.yahoo.com)

I really don't see a problem with that. Students can go home and search to their hearts content and to my knowledge teachers and administrators act as if their control ends at the school boundary. My son is a grade two student at an Australian primary school. Students have internet access so they can run online educational applications. At home I supervise his internet access. I accept that teachers can't to that every second of the day at school.

Imagine is exactly right, because the blacklist will be secret. The explanation being that having a list of RC material available will encourage people to view it... except they won't be able to...

Incidentally, for the people who think this filter is about blocking child porn, consider this: Child porn is illegal, and is the jurisdiction of the federal police. The blacklist will not be maintained by the police, and any ILLEGAL content is to be submitted to the police. The RC filter list is only for UNDESIRABLE content, content that is NOT illegal.

Senator Conroy has been hugely inconsistent about the content of the blacklist. First it was "child porn", then he added "unwanted content" without clarifying what that actually meant and then he changed tack to "Refused Classification", which he then proceeded to repeatedly mention in conjunction with "child porn" in order to fool the public into thinking that the two were synonymous.

Also worth considering is the security of the blacklist. The Australian Communications & Media Authority's blacklist (up

What really strikes me here is that all this "Refused Classification" stuff has been in the media circus for a really long time now, and there's been an instant backlash from those who get it - IT guys, gen Y, etc. But Aussie politicians just don't seem to get it at all - their attitude toward the whole thing, their reactions and replies to all the backlash so far can all be explained with the following assumption:

They think the internet is some sort of extension of traditional media like newspapers and ra

The great firewall of China is the nearest anyone has got to censoring the internet, and they only just manage it by controlling all access to the internet, running everything through their filters, and having draconian penalties for trying to bypass it.... and it still does not work....

Hey we Aussies stop playing games shortly after turning 15! So what's the big deal with wanting to protect our children from these nasty video games aimed at corrupting our youth?

And as far as I have been told by our overlords.. sorry government. Is that child porn is rampant online and you stumble across it far too often, if the solution is as easy as blocking a website why not let them do it to protect us? While they're at it they can protect us from websites that are pro-abortion, that help teenagers d

Of course, ideologues like the limitless possibilities censorship offers when it comes to shaping the thoughts of the population by making inconvenient material unavailable. It also helps them get re-elected. But in this case, censorship has a very clear business aspect: it means that if you as a publisher don't pay up, they have the power to make your product disappear. Not only will your website disappear from view, the censorship filter makes it impossible for people to even talk about your product. So this is about corruption, clear and simple.

It seems australia is "opt-out" of the new technology know has Internet.

I myself would not stop posting comments about any game, even indie games that will never be "validated" by these people. You can't adapt internet to your laws, australia, you must addapt your laws to internet, since Internet is a global thing, and can't be modified by the will a single ( and maybe all ) countrys.

It's not in the summary. There's a long running tradition of foreigners, often Americans, confusing the two. Like many jokes, you need the background to get it. Having been told I spoke good English for an Australian more than once, I found it quite funny.

Why care if that country wants to hide behind a second great internet wall?

Even if that were true (which is debatable) There is the minority to consider. Just because a majority decides to throw their rights away does not make it ok to force that decision on to those who aren't ok with giving up their rights to free speech.

That means that 82.8% of the population is subject to the whims of a politician they _cannot_ vote for or against. The only thing they can do is to change the system as a whole. They can't touch Atkinson.

People like to point fingers at Atkinson but who the fuck created a system where one state can veto _anything_? With no chance of overriding said veto. That's not democracy.

"We", where "we" is our predecessors, did - Australia is a federation of states, and the balance of power that allows one state to veto is due to the fact that the smaller states were afraid of being subject to the whim of the more populous states. This is also responsible for the Senate, where each state has equal representation despite the disparity in population. It's not a perfect democracy, but we've lived with it for a hundred years, and the Americans have lived with a similar one for over 200.

So in order to prevent the small (population) states from being subject to the whim of the larger states you set up a system where any state can force it's views on all other states; resulting in exactly the thing you were trying to avoid?

So in order to prevent the small (population) states from being subject to the whim of the larger states you set up a system where any state can force it's views on all other states; resulting in exactly the thing you were trying to avoid?

The irony is not lost on me =) The federal-state system in Australia is in dire need of reform, with Federal governments increasingly pulling powers from the states by fiat, but the strategy has been pursued by both sides of federal politics irrespective of the competencies or constituencies of the states, so someone to push that reform is not yet in parliament...